raw emotion, and emotional food poisoning

social media is emotional ground beef

we enjoy and suffer an unprecedented access to observing the emotions of strangers. the mass audience pays more attention to strangers’ emotions when they display their emotion with a quality that we tend to, evocatively, call “raw:” when it feels like something that (before social media) we could only have gotten from people with whom we shared a mutual, relatively unmediated relationship.

i’m willing to grant the metaphor and call these displays of strong emotion “raw.” but even in food, raw is not the same as unprocessed, and emotion shown on social media is necessarily somewhat processed, necessarily mediated. at the very least, someone made the decision to turn the camera on.

raw meat can be safe to eat, and even more delicious for its slight disgustingness. but if you were looking to maximize the unsafety of your raw meat, your best bet would be to go for grocery store ground beef.

the meat itself is not as wholesome as our evolved responses lead us to expect from meat: this is the stuff that comes from cows who spend their lives unmoving, ill fed and overfed, unnaturally pressed together, the spread of pathogens ill-controlled by the extensive use of antibiotics. then the meat goes through the grinder, which artificially increases the surface area where pathogens can find a foothold. if the grinder is dirty, pathogens are introduced with great efficiency. the final factor that makes grocery store ground beef dangerous is that any given package you buy comes from many different animals, and if any of the animals were infected they taint the whole mass.

obviously, i think that social media works like the meat grinder—or at least that it’s very, very tempting to let oneself use it like a meat grinder. people artificially increase the surface area of their emotional lives that’s observable to strangers, & also the surface area of their emotional lives that strangers have influence over. and the reflex that social media encourages is to consume strangers’ emotions in a relatively undifferentiated mass. sometimes you get, or take the time to find, the structure of an individual life, but mostly you get an artificially smooth paste of bits of strangers’ lives. we see and are moved by contextless feelings, rarely knowing what the feelings meant or even what results they had.

i’m saying all this, of course, on social media. i like social media! but i don’t value it for its rawness. i have no desire to be raw on social media. i think i owe you strangers better than that, and i think i owe myself better than that, and i think that the rawness that i could even possibly offer you is of a far lower quality than the rawness i do offer to and receive from people that i have an actual mutual relationship.

this is why i like offering you fiction. fiction feels to me more honest than social media self disclosure. like everything on social media, it’s mediated, but it is not pretending to be unmediated; it’s honest about the fact that it is processed. even when people think i’m writing directly about myself (the type of reading that we’ve all practiced most) they are at least trying to figure out what i fictionalized. fiction is, in a word, cooked.